Adaptive Soft Frequency Reuse Scheme for Wireless Cellular Networks

Spectrum scarcity and intercell interference (ICI) are two fundamental limiting factors in wireless cellular systems. Soft frequency reuse (SFR) has been proposed as an effective way to manage the spectrum and reduce ICI in cellular systems. In a static SFR scheme, the allocations of transmit power or subcarriers in each cell are fixed prior to system deployment. This limits the potential performance of the SFR scheme. In this paper, we propose an intercell resource-allocation algorithm, which is referred to as the adaptive SFR algorithm (ASFR), that dynamically optimizes subcarrier and power allocations for multicell wireless networks to improve system capacity. The ASFR first finds the subcarrier and power allocations in each cell by using exhaustive search and greedy descend methods and then iteratively repeats among cells until a predefined convergence criterion is satisfied. The theoretical analysis proves the convergence of the ASFR algorithm. Simulation results show that the ASFR achieves a higher system throughput and better cell edge user performance than existing frequency reuse schemes.